A Freshman With a Tip and No Reason to Back Down

Theo Baker enrolled at Stanford in fall 2022 planning to study computer science. He joined the student paper, The Stanford Daily, essentially as a hobby — a way to feel close to his late grandfather, according to Baker himself in an interview with TechCrunch.

Within weeks, he found something on a scientific forum called PubPeer that nobody in professional journalism had touched in seven years.

Anonymous researchers had been flagging suspicious image manipulations in papers co-authored by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne since at least 2015. Some of those papers dated back even further. Baker told PBS NewsHour that the earliest suspicious paper was published before he was born.

He didn't tip-toe around it. He took the allegations to forensic image analysts, verified them, and published.

What the Investigation Actually Found

The board of trustees launched their own investigation within 24 hours of Baker's first story. That sounds like accountability. It wasn't that simple.

Baker told TechCrunch that one of the board members overseeing the investigation held an $18 million investment in Denali Therapeutics — a company with direct ties to Tessier-Lavigne. That's a conflict of interest the size of a building. It got almost NO mainstream coverage at the time.

The board's final report cleared Tessier-Lavigne of personal misconduct but found he was responsible for overseeing research in five papers that contained data manipulations and errors. He resigned in August 2023, according to PBS NewsHour.

Baker's book, How to Rule the World, published May 2026 by Penguin Press, goes further than the resignation. His central allegation, reviewed by Washington Monthly, is that Tessier-Lavigne's celebrated 2009 Nature paper on Alzheimer's disease — produced while he led research at biotech giant Genentech — was based on fabricated data, and that Genentech's own internal review confirmed it and buried the findings.

Four senior Genentech executives, all under NDA, independently corroborated this to Baker. To test their credibility, he asked them leading questions he knew were false. They didn't take the bait.

A research paper on Alzheimer's disease — one of the most devastating conditions in America — may have been built on fabricated data. The company that found out said nothing. And the man who oversaw it became president of one of the most powerful universities in the world.

What This Is Really About

The Tessier-Lavigne story is the hook. The book is about something bigger.

Baker's How to Rule the World is, according to Washington Monthly, also an ethnographic study of Stanford's campus culture and its deep structural relationship with the venture capital industry. He documents how Silicon Valley money flows into and through Stanford — shaping research priorities, protecting reputations, and insulating powerful people from accountability.

Washington Monthly notes that Baker's "disdain for his subjects" occasionally gets in the way of understanding them. Fair criticism. But the core reporting — the named sources, the verified documents, the forensic analysis — is solid.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Missing

Most outlets are framing this as a feel-good story about a brilliant young journalist. Warner Brothers and producer Amy Pascal have already optioned the rights to his Tessier-Lavigne investigation. George Polk Award. Potential bestseller. Great kid.

But the celebratory framing buries the actual scandal.

A major research university's president allegedly oversaw the suppression of data fraud at a publicly traded biotech company. A board member investigating him had $18 million riding on a connected company. Scientific papers on Alzheimer's research may have been corrupted — and sat in the academic record unchallenged for years because nobody with institutional power wanted to pull the thread.

Baker pulled the thread as an 18-year-old freshman who was warned, multiple times, to stop.

He was also warned that his position within the institution would become "very uncomfortable." He told TechCrunch that turned out to be accurate. He kept going anyway.

The Pipeline

Stanford is not unique. It's just the best-documented example right now.

The pipeline from elite university research labs to VC-funded startups to IPO riches runs through every top-tier school in America. The incentive to protect that pipeline — to suppress inconvenient findings, to look the other way on data irregularities, to shield connected people from scrutiny — is enormous.

Baker documented one case in detail. How many others haven't been documented because no 18-year-old with a George Polk Award happened to show up?

Taxpayers fund federal research grants. Patients make treatment decisions based on published science. The integrity of that system matters — not as an abstract principle, but as a direct, practical question about whether the research your doctor relies on is real.

Baker asked the question. The institution tried to make him stop.

He graduates this June. His book is already in stores. The people who warned him off the story are either gone or wishing they'd never tried.